It's the clear strategy of the governments involved to blame the leaks for causing the problems. Failure to give the government a pass on the grounds that it "should have remained secret" makes you a terrorist.

"Indonesia is threatening to cease cooperation with Australia on human smuggling as a result of further Snowden leaks

... Soo, Indonesia was previously helping Australia with their human smuggling operation? In either event, what does having your corrupt officials mismanaging things have to do with ceasing humanitarian endeavors? This is like saying "After we got busted doing evil things, we're going to just go all in on that whole evil thing, while insisting that you spying on us doing our evil things is wrong and you should stop."

No, it's clearly the new of the leaks that did it. Last week there wasn't a diplomatic crisis, then the leaks came, and now there is a diplomatic crisis.

Quiet diplomacy is only possible when confidentiality is possible.

This just in: mass surveillance of your "allies" pisses them off!

There will probably be more human smuggling and trafficking due to Snowden.

Hahaha! Good old cold fjord. Yeah, it wasn't the fault of the people doing the spying it was Snowden's!! Yeah just like it was the fault of the woman being raped because she wasn't dressed in a burqa not that of the rapist, right?

That's basically why Indonesia isn't liking what's happening. The people smuggling trade brings a lot of money into Indonesia; buying boats, bribing police and officials. Cutting it off is going to annoy quite a lot of people.

I mean, what kind of jingoist, fascist asshole blames the guy who risked his ass to bring the evil deeds of clandestine criminal groups into the sunlight?

So you disagree with my stand opposing human smuggling and trafficking, the hacking of hospitals, anti-slavery charities, and other NGOs, not to mention opposing the killing by the hundreds of innocent tourists having a nice vacation?

That weak attempt to discredit someone by claiming they support policies that no rational person would ever support is the best response you can come up with? Shit, I know middle-schoolers with better game.

And FTR, no, I disagree with your insistence to suck fed cock by laying the blame for their crimes one the one dude who had the fucking hojo's to call them out on it. A point which is likely glaringly obvious to everyone on the planet other than you.

Your stand encourages human smuggling and trafficking. The less we know about espionage, the more of it will happen. The more espionage that happens, the less international cooperation there will be. The less international cooperation there is, the more human smuggling and trafficking there will be.

No, blame falls entirely on the bad behavior of the Australian Signals Directorate and their lack of trustworthyness.

I don't think we should blame the intelligence agencies for this. You don't install sophisticated interception equipment hidden in architectural features of embassies all over the region, and operate them possibly for decades, without a fair amount of cooperation between branches of the government. The intelligence services did what they were told to do, and in that respect, were plenty trustworthy.

Back home, we can't really argue that the NSA was out-of-bounds. We elected officials, they passed laws, they appointed secret judges, they signed secret executive orders, and the agencies did everything within their power to gather intelligence that would help us or protect us. Citizens allowed this to happen (in theory -- assumes civilians are in-the-know), and I see the logic that would lead someone to try to get civilian attention with vandalism on charities and whatnot.

Who told Indonesia they're a US ally? I'm quite serious here, every statement I've seen from Obama on the country where he grew up avoids that word very carefully.

They're a friendly state, and "allied" in the sense that we help each-other achieve certain fairly important tactical goals, but we've got 42 actual Allies. These are countries we are treaty-bound to die for under certain circumstances. In simple practical terms releasing the information that we spy in Indonesia shouldn't surprise anyone. The entire point of having spies is that you use them to spy on people, and if you can't spy on the 3/4 of the world you aren't treaty-bound to protect it was pretty stupid of you to have spies.

This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.

I don't think that's fair to Snowden. Greenwald is the one making the decisions, and he's clearly decided to go for a) the scoop, and b) attacking the Five Eyes while he still can. I don't blame Greenwald for doing this, it's his job. I don't blame Snowden for being so naive that he wouldn't understand Greenwald's entire job is to out secrets with no regard of whether they should be kept secret.

But this isn't High School, so fairness is irrelevent. Snowden leaked shit that he really really really should not have, therefore he will be hated everywhere but slashdot.

Spying on US citizens isn't a disease, it is merely a symptom of the disease. Spying on allied governments is another symptom. Spying on neutral governments is another symptom. Spying on citizens of other nations is yet another symptom.

The actual disease is, the desire to know everything, and hence, to control everything.

When you understand what the NSA's goals are, then you begin to understand how much is wrong. When a doctor learns that a patient has sneezes and sniffles, he doesn't stop there to treat the sneezes and the sniffles. He attempts to learn whether the patient has any more symptoms, then he attempts to make a diagnosis. Prism is just one of many symptoms that go into diagnosing the real problem.

The Disease is the PATRIOT act. and none of you are demanding to your congress critter to repeal it. Or telling everyone you know how it's what allows them to do this and more and getting other riles up about PATRIOT.

That is the answer to fix all of it. Yet everyone here wants to piss in the same bowl of cheerios instead of actually doing anything.

I'm pretty certain that neither the Australian Signals Directorate nor the NSA engages in any sort of rendition

How exactly would you know, if everything is secret, and any potentially illegal activity such as rendition is only vetted by an internal secret court?

As far as NSA goes, I think it's practically a certainty that they have engaged in such practices, since we know for sure that CIA does that. They might not be doing it themselves directly, but rather handing off the names to CIA to reuse the existing infrastructure. If you want to bicker about terminology, okay, so that would be aiding and abetting human trafficking, not human trafficking per se. Big fucking difference.

In any case, you did not refer to NSA to ASD, but to "police and security agencies" in general. And the thing about this scandal is that, while NSA has been the main target so far, they all benefit from this cloud of secrecy to hide away any clear wrongdoings as well as generally questionable activity.

I think that they will need to repeal a lot more than just the Patriot Act at this point. Besides, it is not like operating outside the law has detered these organizations in the past. The only solution is to accept that no government office should be above scrutiny.